APRIORI is a techno-botanical coven (incl. myself, Efrén Cruz Cortés, Suzanne Husky, Lynn DeSilva Johnson [Elæ]) whose mission is to track and encourage emerging revolutionary ecologies of work between plants and machines. For Queer Paranormal, curated by the Two Chairs collective and Anne Thompson, APRIORI shared a number of elements of our project in the […]
APRIORI traveled to Linz in September 2019 to be a part of STAY UNFINISHED!, a show at Stadtwerkstatt, curated by Shu Lea Cheang, and in partnership with Ars Electronica. We (Efrén Cruz Cortés, Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson], myself, and Suzanne Husky) presented the research arm of the project, as well as various codes, spells and video […]
I’m delighted to have an essay entitled “The Politics of the Graft” published in Lunch Journal‘s Issue 13: Mischief. From the essay: “… Grafting is a skilled performative and skilled sculptural gesture to cut branches in a way that make more branches, to attach branches that make fruit and viable pollen, to engage in relationships […]
It was an honor to recently attended the Casa GIAP: Creative Ecologies and Decolonial Futurities residency in San Cristóbal de las Casas. “The call is directed at artists and art researchers from around the world, who are interested in reflecting on the potentials of aesthetics in environmental politics, as well as in familiarizing with ideas […]
UnEarthing/Re-Earthing is an ongoing project by the Coastal Reading Group that considers how to grieve our current epoch of extinction and loss. We ‘read’ environments by unearthing the particular cultivations that colonial, capitalist landscapes engender. It is our proposal that these landscapes prevent the grief process and that grief is essential for resisting the often […]
I was super excited to have a Signal Culture residency in May 2019. I developed a Field:Notes research database for APRIORI over the course of a week, in anticipation of our upcoming fall exhibitions. The environment was welcoming, warm, and supportive. I spent a couple hours every day tracking the many revolutionary ecologies in Owego, […]
I did a talk this spring for the Colgate Art & Art History Lecture Series entitled “Sowing Against Systems, Branches vs Networks, Unearthing Slowness:”
Grafters X Change: Branches and Networks is an eco-art event on March 29th and 30th 2019 where fruit tree enthusiasts throughout Central New York converge to share scionwood and seeds, skills, fruit foods, and art projects in a collaborative, DIY, and interdisciplinary setting. scion branch and seed exchange hands-on demonstrations and workshops eco-art events walking […]
Trees of Tomorrow: The Hidden Politics of Ornamental Street Trees, 2018 Margaretha Haughwout in collaboration with Cody Ann Herrmann and Julian Louis Phillips of the Social Practice Queens MFA program; Larissa Li, Angelica ‘Noguera, Diana Vazguez, Gabriella Heyward, Antonio Crespo, and Destiny Irazarry of the John Bowne High School Agricultural Department in Flushing, Queens; and […]
I was so honored to collaborate with Mark Read, Kathy Engels, and Pamela Jean Tinnen on the Ghostfishing: Eco-Justice Poetry and the Diasporic City project at NYU in September. … … “Seen here across thirteen window vitrines are site-specific artworks: eleven poems and excerpts of poems that inspired their accompanying installations. Through engagement with the […]
An interview with Randall Szott and the folks at Bad at Sports, along with Sarah Nelson Wright of Chance Ecologies, and Francesca Fiore and Hillary Wagner of Soil Series. We speak on the topics of Art and Ecology, and what Szott calls ‘soil practice,’ as an extension of social arts practice: “The imaginative and practical […]
Trees of Tomorrow: A speculative tour and workstation unearths the hidden politics of ornamental street trees in Flushing, Queens: the ways that ornamental street trees shape and are shaped by neighborhoods, soils, economies. This project has many origin stories. It is linked to the Guerrilla Grafters, and our politicization/ protest of ornamentality and sterility of […]
I am developing a new creative work, currently untitled, to be conducted over the next two years. It explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and plant intelligence through a science fictive, dystopian prompt. I am eager to think through the ways nature is cultivated under late capitalism in different parts of the globe, and how […]
I am excited to launch a new project, Trees of Tomorrow, in collaboration with Cody Herrmann and Julian Phillips of Social Practice Queens, Gregory Sholette and Randall Szott, Guerrilla Grafters, and the John Bowne Agricultural High School. True to form, it is a sprawling collaboration. “Trees of Tomorrow is a guided, speculative tour of the […]
This month, we will ask about radical aesthetics, ecological arts practices, multispecies worldings, and the possibilities for survival in the epoch many, including Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway, term the Capitalocene. Those of us who align with nonhuman others in resistance, revolution, and recuperation [1] often rally around sociopolitical acts of worlding; we might […]
APRIORI: Sowing Against Proprietary Systems at SLSA
Efrén Cruz Cortés and I traveled to SLSA in November to exhibit work and to conduct a speculative workstation, where we connected spells, algorithms, and rhizome networks to our SpellWeaver application; spells we write together are converted to algorithms and then converted into customized seed packets meant to liberate witches, plants and machines from capitalist […]